Among Labour members of Parliament in Britain, Tony Benn stood out not only because of his eloquence and wit as an orator but because he held on to the increasingly quaint notion that the party, when in power, ought to implement the policies on the basis of which it had contested the previous election.
Benn, who died last Friday at the age of 88, sat in Parliament for 50 years — beginning in 1950, when he won the seat of Bristol South-East vacated by Sir Stafford Cripps. He was 25 at the time, and when he resigned from the House of Commons in 2001, Benn famously noted that he was doing so in order to “spend more time on politics.”
In between, there were two hiatuses, the first when his father died in 1960 and Benn automatically inherited the title of Viscount Stansgate. He had no intention of sitting in the House of Lords — a chamber he subsequently described as “the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians” — and successfully pushed for legislation that enabled him to renounce the title.
Two decades later, he lost his seat in the 1983 election, after the constituency he had represented for more than 30 years was abolished, but returned to Parliament the following year in a by-election for the seat of Chesterfield, which he continued to represent as long as he remained an MP.
Longevity on its own isn’t necessarily a virtue, of course — although the span of his experience did mean that Benn met Gandhi (his father was secretary of state for India at the time, and Benn loved to cite the Mahatma’s comment on western civilization: that “it would be a good idea”) and Ramsay MacDonald as a child, and as a young man served alongside Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s welfare state.
What perhaps more significantly distinguished him from most of his colleagues, though, was that, having initially been signposted as a rising technocratic star, he steadily shifted to the left — not least on account of his experiences in the Cabinets of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, which led him to realize that power was actually wielded by people other than the elected representatives of the people, be they bankers, captains of industry or bureaucrats in Brussels or Whitehall.
Later in life, he formulated a list of five questions that in his opinion ought to be put to any powerful person, elected or otherwise: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interest do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”
He came to oppose Britain’s integration into what is now known as the European Union on the grounds that the commissioners who ran it were neither chosen by the British people nor accountable to them. Domestically, he mounted arguments against proportional representation on the basis that the vital connection voters had with their MPs would be lost with the abolition of constituencies.
Back in 1981, Benn came within a whisker of being elected deputy leader of the Labour Party amid a massive campaign against him among most of his fellow MPs and almost the entire mainstream media — one of the tabloids described him as “the most dangerous man in Britain,” echoing the fears of those who suspected that his continued political influence might encourage militant resistance against the Thatcherite agenda of vast privatization and working-class disempowerment. It was always easier to denigrate him as a raving revolutionary than to refute his persuasive arguments for democratic socialism. He is also accused of a paramount role in making Labour unelectable for a decade and a half.
When the party did return to power, it was under Tony Blair as New Labour — an organization whose creation Margaret Thatcher (appropriately in Benn’s view) claimed to be her greatest achievement, given that it adopted her policies more or less wholesale and went further than she had in dismantling the welfare state.
Benn vehemently disagreed with Thatcher on every issue but admired her clarity of purpose. He had no time for Blair, because he understandably found utterly distasteful the idea of a Labour leader betraying everything the party once stood for.
For once the word fulsome can accurately be used to describe many of the tributes that have flowed his way in recent days, with most politicians from both sides of the fake political divide echoing the refrain that listening to this committed and principled was a pleasure even while disagreeing with his opinions, and in the media it was easy to discern dregs of the venom that once characterized most commentary on him. The Guardian’s initial report on his demise even cited colleagues still bitter about his “dishonesty” — whereas it was in fact his refreshing candor that unsettled all too many ladder-climbing Labourites.
Although a parliamentarian par excellence, Benn never lost sight of the value of extra-parliamentary initiatives. His in-depth knowledge of Britain’s radical traditions over the centuries fed into his determination to strive for a more equitable future and a better world.
As a relatively youthful MP, Benn stood out as a campaigner against colonialism and apartheid, and through his final decade he served as president of the Stop the War Coalition, vigorously opposing the western tendency toward military intervention and challenging its hypocrisy on Israel. Entirely to his credit, he was an idealist rather than a “pragmatist,” a dissident who seldom hesitated to speak truth to power, even when he was perceived as very much a part of the establishment.
Outside Parliament, he could walk with kings without losing the common touch that enabled him to be an attentive listener to those who had woes to relate. (In fact, he fit the criteria of Kipling’s If better than any comparable figure in recent history.) The aura of hope never deserted him during the increasing frailty of his twilight years. Despite his “somewhat benign, grandfatherly appearance,” as Bruce Springsteen said of Pete Seeger at the latter’s 90th birthday, “he [was] a creature of a stubborn, defiant and nasty optimism” and “a stealth dagger through the heart of [Britain’s] illusions about itself.”
The indefatigable democrat, who educated audiences at all manner of forums in his final dozen years, wanted the inscription at his final resting place to simply read: “Tony Benn — he encouraged us.” Which would be accurate, but far from adequate.
It’s too easy to memorialize (and effectively dismiss) him as a pipe-smoking, tea-drinking dreamer who exemplified Britain’s pluralistic tendencies in the second half of the 20th century. His humanist legacy would be much better served, though, were he to be recognized as a standard-bearer for a future Britain that turns its back on the depredations of neoliberal capitalism — not so much as a diarist who assiduously recorded the follies and fallacies of the past 75 years, but as a signpost for what tomorrow may hold.
